


again and again and again

by montivagantly_writing



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Hobbits, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Immortality, Magical Hobbits, Major Character Injury, but just bilbo, when i say graphic violence i mean GRAPHIC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:34:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28456164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montivagantly_writing/pseuds/montivagantly_writing
Summary: As a fauntling, not even double digits, Bilbo Baggins falls from a tree and splits his skull neatly in two. He had been exploring alone, and so is left unbothered as he lays dead in the grass. He is still unbothered half an hour later when he sits up, stares curiously at the bloodstained earth, and scampers back home. He stands in the kitchen, happily munching a cranberry-orange scone and oblivious to Belladonna’s tears as she runs her fingers frantically through his blood matted hair.orBilbo can't die, and the company finds out much sooner than he had planned (implying he had been meaning to tell them atall, but, well, Bilbo would be a fool to believe anything would go as planned on this confounded journey).
Relationships: Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield, but like not that much - Relationship
Comments: 23
Kudos: 377





	again and again and again

**Author's Note:**

> Please be warned this story is SUPER violent and uncomfortably gory at times (at least in my mind), but y'all can read the Graphic Depictions of Violence tag for yourselves so I digress.
> 
> Enjoy this weird super indulgent fic, hope Bilbo a) dying and b) acting like an idiot around big boy Thorin brings you joy <3

As a fauntling, not even double digits, Bilbo Baggins falls from a tree and splits his skull neatly in two. He had been exploring alone, and so is left unbothered as he lays dead in the grass. He is still unbothered half an hour later when he sits up, stares curiously at the bloodstained earth, and scampers back home. He stands in the kitchen, happily munching a cranberry-orange scone and oblivious to Belladonna’s tears as she runs her fingers frantically through his blood matted hair.

At ten, kelp knots around Bilbo’s ankle in the Bywater Pool. Aldagrim Took, just past his majority, dives in and eventually cuts Bilbo loose. Bilbo is not breathing when he reaches the shore, but is revived by a Bounder who pounds the water out of his lungs. Aldagrim takes Bilbo back to his parents, but is reluctant to let the boy out of his sight. He privately tells Bungo he expected to be cutting loose a corpse. Bilbo’s father seems grimly unsurprised.

At 17, in the middle of the market, Bilbo pushes three year old Odo Proudfoot out of the way of a runaway cart. The horse stomps firmly on Bilbo’s neck and he dies instantly. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, then Lobelia Bracegirdle, screams when she sees him -- neck flattened and blooming a blackening purple, eyes staring sightlessly into the empty sky -- and screams again when he blinks. Bilbo is not without a mantle of whispers drifting behind him for the rest of his years in the Shire (though all but Lobelia can eventually pretend nothing happened when they see him).

At 21, Bilbo starves, freezes, is shot through the heart with an orc arrow, and is ripped apart by wolves on two separate occasions. He lives to die again from a fever in the late-arrived spring. Many Hobbits, including his parents, do not.

At 33, he is at the Green Dragon for his coming of age party. On the way out, a group of drunken Men beat Bilbo to death for disrupting their night out with his “odd Halfling activities”. Isembold and Fortinbras Took, cousins out with Bilbo for a good time, carry him back to a Bounder safe house and clean him up. When he wakes, they walk him (blindfolded, of course. Bounder safe houses are _safe_ , after all) back to Bag End and leave him with tea and no questions asked.

Bilbo Baggins is 51 years old when he dies for the King of Erebor.

The company is drifting off, conversation dropping away and (not so) gentle snores picking up in its place. Thorin sits on watch, wide and dark and brooding, his back lit by the fire as he stares restlessly into the dark.

Bilbo watches him, sleepless in his bedroll. His sleep is short and unfulfilling on the road, and more often than not he finds himself accompanying the dwarf on watch. Tonight, though, it is Thorin. And Bilbo finds the idea of watching the king’s sharp profile much more appealing than actually talking to him, and so elects to stay wrapped in his blankets. But then he hears something, a snap and a soft hiss (gasp? wince? just the wind?). He raises his head, surveying the still slumbering company. It seems he is the only one to have heard anything, and so is, quite unfortunately, delegated with the laborious task of doing something about it. Grumbling curses about his damned Hobbit ears, he removes himself from his tangle of _quite cozy_ bedding and crosses the small space between him and the dwarven prince on watch. “Thorin,” he whispers.

Thorin starts, rising with Orcrist half drawn, before he relaxes. “Bilbo,” Thorin greets. “It would do you well to make a small bit more noise in the future.”

Bilbo is momentarily caught off guard. The lack of bite to the words, a crinkle of warmth about Thorin’s eyes. Before the Carrock, before Goblintown and Azog and the Eagles, those words leaving Thorin’s lips would have felt like a sword across Bilbo’s heart. They would have been sharp and cutting, shaped to splinter Bilbo’s tenuous connection to the party, their purpose to drive home and to _hurt_. But now they are light and as teasing as Thorin’s solemn tone can make them, and Bilbo finds he cannot help but smile as he answers. “Then what kind of burglar would I be?”

Thorin answers him with a shrug and a smile that is as small as it is stunning. “One without my blade through his middle,” he offers.

Bilbo feels warm. Impossibly warm and light and he is smiling again as he looks at Thorin, quite against his own volition, thank you. “Right, well, ah...” Bilbo starts, then clears his throat at the amused quirk of Thorin’s brow. “Right. Thorin,” Bilbo drops his voice, whispering casually as he can manage. “I heard something. To the south of us. I think we’re being watched.”

The joviality is gone from Thorin in an instant, boiling away at Bilbo’s words. He straightens, going stiff and alert for a moment, before forcing himself back into apparent nonchalance. “You must be more specific, Master Burglar,” he says, hand moving slowly back to Orcrist’s hilt. “Such words should not be spoken lightly.”

Bilbo shrugs, thinking he can do this sort of vaguery quite well (he’s had quite a lot of practice saying things without quite saying them, all Hobbits have, really. Genteel politeness layered syrup-sweet over stinging barbs is what the majority of Hobbitish interactions are, anyway. Afternoon tea with his Aunt Mirabella or dinner with the Baggins tribe flexes his muscles of subtlety more than any dwarf king could hope to).

He opens his mouth to answer, and then an arrow buries itself into the back of his neck. It flashes through spine and tendon, the metal-tipped head splitting the skin of his throat and tearing itself nearly free before dragging raggedly to a halt.

Several things happen then, at an indeterminate pace.

Thorin stumbles back as if shot himself, eyes wide and face pale except for a spray of fine red droplets.

Bilbo’s breath catches around the jagged wound and his mouth works silently for a moment. He blinks, reaches up. Blood, hot and thick and too much spills over his hand, hits the ground like water poured from a cup. His fingertips brush against the arrowhead, feeling cool metal and mangled, _open_ flesh. And then the pain hits him. Sharp and blinding and he feels hot in a high, tight way and _gods, again_?

Thorin screams a war cry and the bandits descend. Bilbo is on his knees. A blade flashes above him. An arrow screams past his shoulder. He hits the packed earth, stretched out long on his side scrambling at the arrow through his throat. It hurts. Oh, _Yavanna_ it hurts. He gasps brokenly around the shaft of wood through his windpipe. Blood fountains onto the ground and down his front. It fills his mouth with hot torrents of ichor.

Bilbo has drowned before. He has been crushed down by the endless pressure of water, has felt it reach past his lips and burn down his throat and greedily clutch his lungs. Now he chokes on his own blood, unable to breathe around the shaft of wood through his windpipe but still feeling the blood pulsing down it. Despite the thickness, it feels strangely the same, he thinks distantly. The same sensation of his lungs being so completely full. The same desperate certainty that, could he get any air down, it would simply have nowhere to go.

Bilbo eventually stills, silencing, becoming another shadow in the grass.

It is not the worst way he has died.

It _is_ the worst way he has woken up, he discovers a few moments later when he comes back into his body, jerking and gasping in the blood-wet grass.

The arrow is still in his throat. Never before has he woken before being out of harm’s way. He was cut loose from drowning before he could wake to water still in his lungs, the wolves chased from his corpse before they could begin to devour him. Now, his body has returned to begin to die again, and a horrendous, world-tilting panic floods through Bilbo’s death-addled brain. What if this was it? If the company was captured and led away, he was far enough out of the fire’s light to avoid being noticed. What if their attackers left and didn’t think to return? If he was to be left to die for gods know how long? Days? _Months_? Of choking on his own blood and the arrow through his throat until he is ripped apart by scavengers? Even then, he muses bitterly, but...

No.

With trembling, weakening fingers, he gropes blindly behind his neck. His fingers, covered with the ever spilling blood, slip off the arrow shaft once, twice. He finally grasps it tight and snaps the fletching off. Ignoring the bolt of fire that lances through him from the jolt, he grips the arrowhead in one hand and _yanks_. The metal sinks into his hand and anchors itself there, pulling searingly at his palm as he tugs the arrow free from his throat. He knows the frantic motion has cut too deep, has probably cut tendons, but he barely feels it. Barely feels anything, now. His fist uncurls from the arrowhead, but it stays stuck in the thick skin of his palm.

His fingers twitch.

Thorin beheads two of their enemies with one swing.

Bilbo’s eyes stare, glassy and blank, at the blood soaked grass in front of him.

As the fight comes to a quick but violent close, bandits defeated easily by the tidal force that is The Company of Thorin Oakenshield, Bilbo’s body lays off to the side of the clearing where it had fallen, unbothered.

As the wound slowly closes from the inside out (spine realigning where the arrow forced vertebrae apart, muscles re-chording, arterial walls creeping shut), Thorin cuts the hands from the bandits’ archer.

The man’s screams echo for a heartbeat or two before his body slumps to the grass.

There is an odd silence about the clearing. There should be revelry, talk, celebration for a job well done. But the dwarrow instead stare uncertainly at Thorin, his obvious display of vengeance sought ringing alarms in their minds. For the company stands whole and hale and victorious, yes? Each dwarf stands tall, bloodied with ichor not their own, yet their king grieves with a silent intensity that seems more like shock.

A ragged gasping sounds from the edge of the clearing just as Balin steps forward. Both he and Thorin jerk, but Balin to his sword.

Thorin just… stares. For a long moment he is caught in some eerie stillness. And then the king is running, crossing the clearing in half a breath before skidding to his knees. He stops, staring down at the shadow in the grass for a strange moment, and then begins to murmur in frantic Khuzdul at whatever he sees.

Bofur puts it together first, and sprints forward with a gasp and a cry of Bilbo’s name. The company stalls for a moment, then rushes forward like blood from a wound.

Bilbo’s fingers twitch. Beyond his awareness, a man’s hands are cut off. Some timeless seconds later, Bilbo awakens. His eyes fly open and he gasps sharply, hungrily for air. It races down his now open windpipe and burns not quite like water, but he continues to greedily fill his now ready lungs. Bilbo breathes in big gasping heaves, twitching like a fish on land as his senses come back on line. He blinks a few times to dispel the sudden shadow in his vision, but quickly realizes it is Thorin, kneeling over him.

Thorin stares at him for a moment that is both impossibly long and agonizingly brief, and then Thorin’s hands are holding his, gliding across his arms, reverently brushing his neck. The dwarf’s words are as fuzzy as his image, but don’t become comprehensible. Instead, they resolve into rumbling Khuzdul, welling deep from Thorin’s chest.

The company crowds around them then, but Bilbo is still coming back from the dead, and is otherwise too completely preoccupied with Thorin’s hands running over him to fully appreciate it. Bilbo’s nerve endings still sing with their thrust back into life and Thorin’s rough hands sweep great swathes of fire across him. It does not burn, but for just a moment Bilbo thinks that he wouldn’t mind dying to this kind of fire.

Then something comes back online in his brain and Bilbo realizes the desperate fear on Thorin’s face, half-hidden by his endless stoicism but frighteningly present. He forcefully brings himself out of his, albeit pleasant, half-awareness and grimaces. “Thorin,” Bilbo says, voice rough and grating but there. Thorin’s frantic, incomprehensible flow of words stops and Bilbo smiles. “I am alright,” he says, and already his voice is smoother. Not completely normal, but considering the arrow that was just through his vocal cords, he is content with the progress. “I promise,” he says. “Here.” He shakily takes Thorin’s large hand in his own and guides it up. He presses Thorin’s fingers to the new skin of his throat, not quite stilling the answering shiver. When he removes his hand, Thorin’s stays.

Thorin’s touch is impossibly light as he swipes a calloused thumb over the point of rupture. Blood, drying and tacky, skids his touch. “I thought you dead,” Thorin says quietly. A muscle in his jaw jumps, but the gentleness of his hand against Bilbo’s skin remains unchanged. He looks up from Bilbo’s bloodied neck, then, meeting the hobbit’s eyes with a startling ferocity. “I watched an arrow come through your neck,” he says lowly. “And you yet breathe.”

Bilbo winces and frowns. “Yes, well,” he begins, raising himself into a sitting position. Thorin immediately wraps an arm around his back and Bilbo briefly but completely loses every thought in his mind The hobbit stops, clears his throat before trying again, hoping it is still too dark for his flush to be distinguished from the blood still wreathing him. “It’s… rather complicated, really,” he says, but Thorin interrupts.

“You cannot die,” Thorin says.

Bilbo’s jaw clicks shut. “Well…” the hobbit trails off. He shrugs. “Yes, actually. That’s about it.” Silence rings after that, the air humming with the tension charged through it. He is torn between the warmth of Thorin’s hand and the familiar cold fear of _they know_. Thorin is nearly holding him and there is no aggression in the gesture, no careful tensing of muscles to run or fight. Bilbo knows fear. Is intimately acquainted with the chill of it. Thorin is nothing but warmth. The realization is dizzying.

“Wait, sorry,” Fili says, raising a hand. “Hold on. Can’t die?”

“Are you immortal?” Kili follows. He makes a small sound of indignation at Fili’s answering swat.

Bilbo sighs, long and with the pain hidden as best he is able, though the bantering of the princes had helped to lift some of the old fog. It used to descend on him before going to the market. However old he got, there would be whispering. Now matter how many years had passed, no matter how many of the gossipers eventually went silent, there were still those who couldn’t let go of his past. “I had not ever planned to tell you all,” he admits without quite really meaning to.

The company freezes and Bilbo curses quietly. “It is just that…” he trails off, wraps one arm around his knees. There is a long moment, then. A long moment in which Bilbo is quiet and obviously contemplative enough to stave off prodding. He lifts his other arm to wrap around himself as well, but an odd sound from Thorin makes him stop. It is a quiet, choked noise, and is not one Bilbo thinks was entirely intentional. Then something thin and hard bumps his leg, and there is a jolt of pain through his hand, and Dwalin is suddenly swearing more colorfully than Bilbo ever thought possible.

Thorin takes Bilbo’s hand then, and, oh. Yes, Bilbo supposes he can understand, now. The arrow is still embedded in his palm. The head of the thing is wickedly sharp, sharp enough to _cut through_ him, and is barbed along its angles. It clings stubbornly to its hold in his flesh, and now that fresh blood has stopped flowing so freely, and sticky pre-scab has begun to gel it into place. It makes for quite a grisly sight, and Bilbo makes a face at it. “Oh dear,” he says, going to pull his arm free. “I am terribly sorry about that. I’ll just--” but he stops when Thorin doesn’t let him go.

The dwarf king’s lips are pulled into a thin, bloodless line and his grip on Bilbo tightens, firm but not painful. He slowly lifts Bilbo’s hand, inspecting the wound with an intensity that leaves the Hobbit a little breathless.

“It’s nothing, really,” Bilbo says, desperate for something, _anything_ to stop the agonizing sight of Thorin’s pain. “I just had to get it out. I have obviously had worse.”

But that is precisely the wrong things to say, and Bilbo knows it as soon as he’s opened his overly large and overly stupid mouth. Thorin, if possible, holds Bilbo _closer_ and is now _staring_ at him and Bilbo supposes he will just die now. Simply combust. Nothing to be done about it, really. He stares breathlessly into Thorin’s ice-blue gaze, the gaze of kings, and is regrettably but immediately lost to it.

"Get it out?" Ori repeats in a small voice.

Kili whines high in his throat and covers his neck with one hand. Fili wordlessly draws him closer, face pinched.

“I have never,” Thorin begins slowly, wonderingly, _achingly_. “In my life, underestimated a creature as much as I have you, Master Baggins. _Bilbo_ ,” he corrects, ignoring or not noticing the hobbit’s small intake of breath. Thorin shakes his head, gaze wandering down to the bloody arrow in Bilbo’s hand. “You have the strength of our greatest warriors brimming within you.”

The words feel like honey on a sore throat, the soothing rush of cool water on a hot day, but the pain cracking Thorin’s carefully constructed walls is really too much, and Bilbo decides he needs to put a stop to it right then and there. Especially when Thorin begins waxing breathtakingly sorrowful poetic about his conduct towards Bilbo, about the company’s failing of Bilbo, about how much he and this quest have ever hurt Bilbo, and the company begins nodding gravely along and _Bilbo_ , fresh from the dead and having his eulogy aired while he is still alive, has had quite enough of it. He huffs, rolls his eyes, and with his uninjured hand, reaches around Thorin’s hold to pull the arrow roughly from his palm.

There is about the expected reaction.

The entire company surges forward, some with simple gasps (Balin, Bombur, Nori), others going as far as to kneel beside him and, what? Stare at the now bleeding gash in his hand (Fili, Kili, Bofur, _Dori_ , even)? But Thorin’s reaction, as always, is the one Bilbo is drawn to. The king’s grip goes momentarily vice-tight on Bilbo’s arm, then loosens to non-bruising pressure and he starts speaking roughly in Khuzdul in a manner suspiciously similar to swearing. He moves one hand to cradle Bilbo’s and _hills_ , was Thorin’s hand always so large? It hadn’t seemed so before, but now against his own, Thorin’s hand is simply _enveloping_. The king’s other hand comes up with a surprisingly clean cloth to press to the blood flow. Oin grumbles something about infections but is content with remaining unheard.

Bilbo sighs and shakes his head, trying to bury the warm fluttering in his chest at Thorin’s care. “Honestly,” he says. “It’s no more than a scratch now, see?” He splays his fingers, easily suppressing the small twinge of answering pain to ensure these _fool_ dwarves he made the mistake of caring for that he was truly and completely fine. “My body healing sort of…” Bilbo trails off, waves his other hand searchingly for a moment. Said other hand is still covered in blood (from his throat, pulsing, wave after wave after burning swallow, _drowning_ \--) and several dwarrow follow its flight with hard eyes. “Pushed it out, towards the surface,” he continues, swallowing down the brief gorge that rises (thick and hot and sticky and _please not again_ ) and flexing his mostly healed hand.

“Like a splinter,” Ori murmurs wonderingly, then cringes as attention swings toward him like he had not quite meant to be heard.

Bilbo gives him a soft smile anyway. “Yes,” he says. “I’d imagine so.” There is quiet, then. A moment in which the forest around them takes a soft breath, a moment of blessed quiet after the storm. Now that the chorus of battle has finished, the gentle orchestra of night has resumed, accompanied by the still-crackling fire. It has been abandoned, like the rest of their campsite (and the bodies still littering it), in favor of the entire company crowding around Bilbo at the edge of the slight dip in the land they’ve settled in.

Bilbo frowns at the grass, picks up the front end of the arrow, bloody and jagged. He hopes Thorin doesn’t feel him flinch at the company’s stifled murmuring. “It is not that I do not trust you,” he says finally. “That’s not why I stayed silent. I am quite aware of how well Dwarrow can keep a secret.”

There is some low appreciative laughter, especially praising from Bifur’s direction. Bilbo feels another knot deep inside him uncoil and he relaxes a little more. “It is just an odd thing, you see,” he says. He rolls the arrow in his good hand, staring unseeingly at the instrument of his death. “And there are those... unsettled by that which they do not understand.”

Thorin stiffens minutely around him. His fingers curl gently into Bilbo’s side in a manner the Hobbit might deem protective if he didn’t know better.

Bilbo lets out a small huff through his nose, lips curving into a sharp and bitter smile. “And of course, there are those who are simply content to _talk_ ,” he adds. _Talk_ spat out like drawn poison from a wound, evil and foul and deadly. Several of the company shuffle, rubbing the backs of their necks, shifting their weight to the other foot, but they most obviously _stop talking_.

(He cannot see Thorin’s glower from over his shoulder, but it is a dark and terrible thing.)

“How long have you-- ah-- known of this, laddie?” Balin asks haltingly, gesturing vaguely to Bilbo’s bloodstained front.

Bilbo hesitates. He can’t help but to. He tightens his grip on the arrow shaft, glancing up at Balin. Bilbo’s expression has fallen into the old lines of his wariness, long since learned to be kept hidden. Balin looks genuinely taken aback by whatever distrust is plain on the Hobbit’s face, possibly even somewhat wounded, and Bilbo looks away again.

Hobbits are nasty creatures, once you get to know them. Cruel and petty and better at holding grudges than even the most stubborn dwarf, at times. Most often, Hobbits are also the most polite creatures to roam Middle Earth. You will not hear a single word spoken against a Hobbit be they guest or host. Unless by some unreasonable prejudice (The Green Dragon, fists thudding dully into his flesh, darkness and blunt kicks and eventually the sharp finale of blades), Hobbits were a generally well liked people. Inside, though, some seem so thoroughly and purely rotten that it is as though they have never seen the sun a day in their lives. Hobbits gossip and rumor and prattle. They are more loving of drama than even the elves, even if it’s never been said aloud.

Hobbits gossiped and rumored and prattled quite a lot about Bilbo after his… _incident_ at 17. At first, there was only silence where we walked, and he left in his wake waves of whispers crashing relentlessly behind him. They followed both Bilbo and his parents wherever they stepped foot beyond the walls of their home. When locked securely inside Bag End, they moved to surround instead of follow. Despite their Hobbitish love of drama, neither the Gamgees nor the (more genetically direct) Tooks ever joined in. In the Great Smials of Tookborough, Bilbo and his family could rest in silence. There must be balance in all things, though, and that balance came in the form of Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. As much as he detests the woman, Bilbo cannot bring himself to truly hate her. She hates him, most definitely and obviously, but it is because she is afraid of him, Belladonna tells Bilbo one evening, carding her hands gently through his curls. Lobelia is afraid of the death she sees with every involuntary glance towards Bilbo’s neck, afraid of meeting glassy eyes in every glare. Bilbo does not hate her. Does not hate any of The Shire, not truly. He cannot, after all, when he so thoroughly understands them. He is also a Hobbit, at the end of the day. But one could still see where Bilbo’s hesitance is birthed from. Hating someone makes the pain of their harm easier, and Bilbo couldn’t even do that.

Unwittingly, Bilbo thinks back to the Tooks. Of Isembold and Fortinbras caring for him so gently, so tenderly, still with the love he knows he _should_ receive from family. He thinks of the Great Smials, of the silence that made Bilbo feel loved again, if only for the briefness of visits. He thinks of Fili and Kili, how they still crack jokes around him and are still looking at him like they care, like they are ready to lean into him and weather any storm that dares threaten _their_ Hobbit. He thinks of the warmth at his back, unflinching and strong and safe. Bilbo can’t say with any truth that _safe_ is something he feels often.

So, when Balin asks, what is there to do but answer?

“For as long as I can remember,” Bilbo answers truthfully. “And longer than that, if I am to listen to my parents.” He picks at a blade of grass, shrugs. “They knew I-- that--” Bilbo breaks off and swallows thickly, pushing away the fear and cold and _they’ll leave, they always do_. “They first realized when I was very little,” he finishes lamely, resolutely not looking anyone in the eye.

Thorin goes very still behind him, and Bilbo once again realizes he has employed the use of his large and idiotic mouth. Thorin is absolutely still and absolutely silent, bar the slow tightening of his grip around Bilbo, pulling the Hobbit ever so slightly closer. Bilbo knows Thorin’s caught on to the subtext of his words, but the dwarf doesn’t seem to truly want an answer.

Bilbo is perfectly content with not giving him one, but the company is slowly beginning to realize (Gloin, Bombur, Dori, parents by blood or no) the unvoiced suggestion of his words. One of them will eventually ask, but Bilbo gives into his need for control in the whirlwind of truth he has found himself in, and barrels ahead with an explanation. “When I was just a faunt,” he begins before he can convince himself otherwise. “A wee thing, shouldn’t have been left unsupervised, really, I decided to attempt a scaling of the two century old oak down by the Bywater. Honestly, even at _that_ age I should have known better. But I went on ahead anyway, bored and stupid and brave and, well,” Bilbo stops and shakes his head ruefully. “I-- I fell.” He pulls his shoulders closer in around him. “And I died.”

Murmuring breaks out, low and soft like the edge of a wave swirling gently onto shore. It begins to swirl inward towards the hobbit, lapping at him and tugging at his clothes and pulling _down_. He feels his shoulders begin to hunch up, muscles pulling taught beneath his skin. Then Bilbo jumps when Thorin hisses something in Khuzdul.

“Itkitî,” the king snaps harshly, and the company falls immediately and completely silent. “I apologize,” he says lowly, rubbing a thumb absently over the outside curve of Bilbo’s wrist. “Continue.”

Bilbo takes a deep breath, feeling awash with the warmth of Thorin’s cessation of the whispers, of the calloused thumb moving against the skin of his wrist. He lets it out with a sigh, forces the tension from his shoulders. He swallows thickly, leaning unconsciously back into the grounding heat of Thorin’s chest. “It’s not something a thousand children haven’t done before,” Bilbo says ruefully. “I just happened to be one of the lucky ones that got back up.” He huffs out a laugh through his nose, mouth quirking at one end. “Though not by the usual means.” He adds. Thorin’s grip tightens on him minutely and Bilbo rolls his eyes. “I have been living like this for 51 years,” he says tightly, turning in Thorin’s hold ( _hold_ , Thorin has been _holding_ him for _minutes now_ ) to raise an eyebrow at the dwarf king, ignoring the murmurs of “ _fifty-one?!_ ” from the Company.

Thorin seems taken aback, still more than a little concerned, but a hint of amusement softens some of the lines in his face when the hobbit turns to face him. “I think I know quite well how much I can or cannot handle,” Bilbo continues heatedly. “I am not some-- some fragile dishware that need be wrapped up and protected from my own mortality. I will have you know that I am-- that-- th-- are you laughing at me?” Bilbo splutters, because Thorin is, indeed, laughing at him.

Thorin has broken Bilbo’s gaze and is chuckling at his lap, shaking his head slowly. When he looks up again, it is with the same half smile that first greeted him on watch earlier in the evening. Gods did that seem like days ago. But here and now, Thorin is smiling at him again, and Bilbo feels it hit him like heat from an oven.

“I am simply happy that you truly seem well,” Thorin says, and there is an impish cast to his expression that reminds Bilbo suspiciously of Kili. “Indeed, well enough to be reprimanding me as usual.”

Bilbo gapes at Thorin for a moment, then violently and unfortunately flushes. He huffs, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t last much more than a week out here _without_ that reprimanding,” Bilbo says, not at all pettily, turning his head away with an imperious sniff. Thorin laughs again, but this laugh is full and rich and Bilbo squeaks when Thorin pulls the hobbit closer to his chest, lets Bilbo feel the deep rumble of that laugh through his back.

“Of course not,” Thorin says, bemused and relieved ever so _warm_ , and Bilbo has miraculously, completely forgotten about the blood still coating them both in favor of becoming a puddle of Hobbit in Thorin’s lap. “Then what kind of burglar would you be?”

**Author's Note:**

> uhh h so I don't like this ending? if anyone has any suggestions I'll gladly take them lmao
> 
> also,, will there be a sequel? more chapters?? idk probably not but i really like this concept so if i think of anything... :^Þ


End file.
